Deauville forum: Women want a different business agenda

For the past few days the cobbled streets of the chi-chi French seaside resort of Deauville have been awash with well-cut black trouser suits, bright African robes and Muslim scarves as some of the most powerful women in business, development and politics from Nigeria to Iceland descended on the Normandy coast for the Women's Forum for the Economy and Society.

The forum was set up by French businesswoman Aude Zieseniss de Thuin as a female alternative to the talking shop the World Economic Forum in Davos. It does not aim to be a feminist gathering, but simply to give women a voice.

What was striking, however, was not that there was any one voice on the crisis, but the diversity of perspectives. Much of the mainstream debate about the crunch has centred on the regulation of banks, with financial institutions waging a so far pretty successful trench war to resist heavy handed interventions to curb profits and bonuses: Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan are both on course for huge payouts.

Important though this is, many of the women in Deauville are calling for a wider focus, to expand the discussion so it includes others – men and women, and people from poorer nations – apart from financiers and policymakers.

Halla Tomasdottir, co-founder of Audur Capital, an investment firm run with what she calls the feminine values of long-termism and sustainability, is one of the organisers of the National Assembly for a New Iceland. Next month it will hold an event with 1,500 people sitting round 160 tables of nine, brainstorming ways the troubled nation might recover. She calls participants "the ants", in the belief that a large, diverse group of people can achieve as much as a powerful elite.

In the UK, insofar as there has been a debate about women and the crunch, it has concentrated on female corporate power, or lack of it.

Opinion is split: Professor Charles Goodhart told the Treasury select committee that the financial sector would benefit from less of an alpha male mentality and the crisis would have been less likely if women had been better represented. However, hedge fund manager Nichola Pease told the same committee that sexism in the City had "died a death". But she presumably thought Northern Rock, where she was a non-executive director, was a great bank, and it died a death too.

A response to the crisis that takes account of women's voices is not just about getting more female faces on the boards of financial institutions and other companies, though that does need to happen. It is also, as Anne Lauvergeon, chairman of French energy giant Areva says, that the financial crisis needs to be seen in the context of crises in climate change, food supply, education, health and the institutions that govern us.

Lauvergeon, one of the most respected business leaders in France, is no bleeding-heart liberal; her point is that, looking ahead, we will need to go right back to making sure we can supply humanity's basic needs for food, water, shelter and warmth.

She also advocates a root-and-branch rethink about what companies are for, going beyond the preoccupation with shareholder value that has led some to think the business of business is to deliver maximum profits in minimum time.

Corporate cultures need to change to incentivise creativity and innovation – of the non-financial variety – by allowing employees time to think freely and come up with new ideas, rather than treating them like work machines. They also need to spend less time thinking about managing reputation, public relations and how they appear to the outside world, and more time thinking about ethics; internal values rather than external appearances.

A number of women at the forum argued that the potential of small businesses was overlooked, not just for empowering women, but also for what they can teach larger ones: values such as putting customers first, the direct linkage of risk, results and rewards, and the importance of being rooted in communities.

Small businesses, including those run by women, could be major creators of jobs in the future if credit flows to them and not just between banks, particularly in the developing world, where they can also bring about social change. One example is the work of Kah Walla, a Cameroonian entrepreneur honoured by the Clinton Global Initiative. She works with 900 women market traders with a combined turnover of $31m, to encourage them to get together and work to ease the bureaucracy and complex tax issues they face and to increase their awareness of HIV and Aids.

And as Karen Kornbluh, American ambassador to the OECD, pointed out, both women and men need to think about how to become more responsible consumers, taking responsibility upon themselves to challenge companies and governments.

It is far too simplistic to suggest that all women leaders think differently from men about the credit crunch; a number of female bankers and business lobbyists were plugging the standard lines. But it is encouraging that women's voices are being heard and that gatherings like this are bringing women together to create change.

Harriet Harman's initiative to link female politicians throughout the EU and beyond, so that their combined clout to put women's concerns on the agenda is greater than the power they have as individuals, similarly recognises the need for collective action.

Some of the biggest global challenges will affect women right at the sharp end. The ageing population will have a huge impact on them as the main carers for the elderly, and food security will hit them in their role providing and cooking for the family.

Women do not want to be passive in the face of this: they want a say in changing the world.

Sign up for the Guardian Today

Our editors' picks for the day's top news and commentary delivered to your inbox each morning.